UK-wide cycle journey planner CycleStreets - Cycle navigation for cyclists, by cyclists. Plan routes from A to B anywhere in the UK (other countries gradually being added), with a choice of four routing modes to suit a range of cyclists from beginner to regular commuter. And the Photomap lets you submit photos of infrastructure problems or good practice.

This page is about the cycle journey planner system. For tagging cycle streets within OpenStreetMap, see the bicycle_road=* tag.

CycleStreets is a UK-wide (and beyond) cycle journey planner system, which provides a means to plan routes from A to B by bike. It is designed 'by cyclists, for cyclists', and caters for the needs of cyclists of all abilities. It was written by two regular cyclists (and cycle campaigners) living in Cambridge, UK.

The system provides the fastest route, quietest route and third route balancing these two, for each itinerary requested.

A major redesign and upgrade is taking place over Summer/Autumn 2015, and version 2 of the developer API has been launched. The site is currently marked as being in beta.

Contents

Routing algorithm / features

CycleStreets is the original utility cycle journey planner for cyclists, by cyclists.

The journey planner aims to emulate the decision-making decisions of real cyclists, giving a choice of routes to suit any ability. A wide variety of on-street factors are taken into account - such as road conditions, cycle infrastructure, partial favouring of Local Authority / national signed routes, paths and cut-throughs, directionality, surface quality, barriers, lighting and much more. Routing takes into account elevation at all times. Even the width of cycle lanes is taken into account in the determinations of the best routes, where such data exists in OpenStreetMap. Basic support for turn delays is in place and is being extended shortly.

Various aspects of the journey planner implementation are documented within the help pages. (The documentation does not yet fully reflect the range of optimisations in place, and will be updated later in 2015.) The data import involves a set of transformations of the OSM data, followed by an extensive series of optimisations and pre-processing to increase routing performance.

Routing takes account of hills/contours, using a variety of elevation data sources. Elevation profiles are also shown.

Routes are saved to a user's profile if signed in. Export of planned routes in KML and GPX is provided.

Photos (see below) geolocated along a planned route are shown on the route ("Photos-en-route"). There is also a Google StreetView integration.

The developers are keen to encourage feedback, and provide a customised feedback form on each page. Routing feedback is sent to a list which includes a few OSMers. An improved feedback handling and triaging system is, as of 2015, under development to allow greater OSM community visibility of data issues which are highlighted by problematic routes that users have planned.

Photomap

The Photomap is intended as a campaigning tool for cycle campaigners. It consists of around 60,000 user-generated, geolocated photos relating to cycle infrastructure, each categorised and with rich metadata.

A gallery feature is provided to enable photos to be grouped together. Tagging is also available. The best photo taken that day of the year is auto-tweeted as the 'Photo of the day'.

The front-end website software is written in object-orientated PHP 5, consisting of around 250 traditional OO classes covering all aspects of the site (routing, photomap, collisions, GPS tracking, API, etc.) , and currently uses MySQL.

Various software libraries are used, including Leaflet.js, ultimateForm, jQuery.

The code is not yet open-sourced, but it is planned to do so in future following a thorough audit of the code. The mobile apps are on Github under the GPL.

History

The system originates from an earlier system on Cambridge Cycling Campaign's website, which launched on 27th Jun 2006. Accordingly, it is one of the very first online cycling routing systems available. The code has been refactored and substantially developed since then. The Camcycle system had ~5,000 lines drawn over a Google Map base in the Cambridge area. CycleStreets, by contrast, uses OSM and indeed is one of the earliest users of OSM.

The CycleStreets system went into public beta launched on March 20th, 2009, taking the system UK-wide. There was an initial testing focus on Edinburgh, Cambridge and London and some other areas (being places most familiar to the development team and contacts).

No date is set yet for removal of the beta status indication, however, the following will be implemented for that change: